VIETNAM ALL OVER AGAIN - THE COLOMBIA DRUG WAR

Small, Poor, Remote Country

History of political instability. Rich people still screwing over poor
people as they've done from the Year One. Decades-old guerrilla war
that began with machetes and shotguns now escalating to big-time
weapons. US government sends money. Political advisers. Military
advisers. More money. Now it's two kinds of military helicopters.
Haven't we seen this movie before? The Americanization of Colombia's
civil-drug war looks and smells like Vietnam all over again.
Twenty-five years after Saigon fell like a rotting plum from the grasp
of Uncle Sam and the corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese regime,
we're trying the same dumb thing all over again.

Oh, did I mention the herbicide? Just as we blanketed Southeast Asia's
jungles and peasantry with Agent Orange, we're getting ready to
contaminate the hillside drug crops of Colombia with herbicide.

All in the name of preventing American drug addicts from smoking,
swallowing, snorting, shooting, and otherwise making themslves first
very high and then very low with cocaine and heroin.

We are exporting the wrong solution to a problem we won't face up to
right here at home. Money is no object. Here, we pay any price, bear
any burden, right? Wrong. The $1.3 billion Congress just approved for
Colombia on the Clinton administration's say-so is good money after
bad.

The loot was wrapped up in one of those fiendishly concocted
congressional stews: big bones for farmers; medium-sized cutlets for
emergency aid for hurricanes and forest fires from last year; lavish
dollops of this and that for lobbyists from here and there; add a
little pork, a lot of seasoning to kill the smell, and, presto, you
have an omnibus spending bill that legislators want in an election
year to grease their return to the trough.

So the money for Colombia was on rails. It was wired. There was no way
you were going to stop it. Too many lawmakers were turned into
sausage-makers, grinding up the scraps to serve up one giant kielbasa
of a spending bill, pork sausage by the trainload. Too many of our
solons had catheters running into their gluteus maximus from the
intravenous bank labeled ''pork/saline solution.'' A drip here, a drip
there, and now 60 brand-new US military helicopters are on their
ponderous way south, ready to zap guerrillas on the orders from
somebody in Bogota.

If there was a sound track to accompany this script, it would be the
''duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh'' of ''Jaws,'' the ominous incantation of
something very bad about to unfold. Yet again we embrace a pricey,
high-tech solution to a problem that is rooted in human nature, not in
the chemistry lab of the herbicide cooker-uppers. I am not some
fungicidal maniac on the point. I've never been anywhere near
Colombia. But we're making their problems our problem - big mistake.
Our drug fighting civil servants, our military, and our biological
warfare researchers have concocted this scheme, and the environmental
people are dubious in the extreme, according to yesterday's New York
Times exclusive unmasking the program.

Because of the exquisite vulnerability of the politician - any
politician - to the deadly taunt of being ''soft on drugs,'' many
otherwise sensible legislators panic and bolt when confronted with
honest choices about the human propensity to self-dose with
mind-altering chemicals.

This particular virus is at its most virulent in election years,
peaking in the fall. So rare is the congressman who proclaims that
this whole approach is a fraud, a massive, expensive, hollow, and
cynical exploitation of parental fears designed to reward cunning
lobbyists and careerists in cushy slots. It won't work. Can't work.

It's the wrong war, in the wrong hemisphere. The enemy is within, not
without.The enemy is human nature. The problem, dear Brutus, is not
within our stars but in the gene pool of frail and fragile drug
addicts here who will lie, cheat, steal, and murder for a chemically
induced endorphin rush.

Because our politicians refuse to recognize the drug debacle is a
crisis of demand and not of supply, we externalize the problem. We are
trying to build a fortress around Colombia and contain the problem
there. It cannot work. What about Mexico? Southeast Asia's Golden
Triangle? There are not enough soldiers and helicopters and narco
informers to keep track of the flow. We already know we cannot keep
contraband narcotics out of our maximum security prisons. How are we
going to do it in a jungle 6,000 miles away?

The most honest and practical solution is to decriminalize the use of
all narcotics. Tax its distribution. Furnish detox beds for everyone
willing to try to shake the demons. And recognize there will be
casualties. Just as some Americans cannot tolerate alcohol and kill
themselves, we'll have to accept drug-related slow-motion suicide.

Some will say ''never!'' But that same old old argument will pitch
global society into an ever deepening cycle of corruption,
exploitation, and erosion of honest government if we allow the
fantastic flows of drug money to gain more traction. Human nature
cannot resist the lure of fortunes to be made dealing drugs illegally.
The poor farmers who get more for coca leaves than coffee beans will
keep doing it no matter how many choppers fly overhead.

And our addicts will keep snorting, shooting, and swallowing what they
crave until their inner spritual emptiness is filled. We can poison
the Andes and slaughter peasants and reelect the same tired
politicians every other year. It's Vietnam redux: If it's not working,
double the tonnage.